Had a quiet moment in the office this lunchtime and wanted to fill the silence with some backgorund radio. So I fired up iTunes 10.3 and thought to check whether any BBC radio stations were available in the Radio listings – a curious omission for the last five years or so that I’ve been using iTunes. Turns out they are there, but it’s not always obvious as to where they appear in the listings, not helped by the lack of search functionality, which is a shame.

What you’ll find and where:

BBC Radio 1: Top 40 / Pop

BBC Radio 1Xtra: Top 40 / Pop

BBC Radio 2: Adult-Contemporary

BBC Radio 3: Classical

BBC Radio 4: News / Talk Radio

BBC Radio 4 LW: News / Talk Radio

BBC Radio 4 Extra: Comedy

BBC Radio 5 Live: News / Talk Radio

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra: Sports

BBC Radio 6: Alternative Rock

BBC Asian Network: International / World

It just makes more sense to me as a consumer that radio should come from the music app on a device, rather than from inside a web browser running flash and goodness-knows-what in the background just to grab and decode an MP3/MP4 stream. Online radio doesn’t need to be complicated – can we please lose the Flash and its contemporaries already?